Peasant Princess

I've been going through a video series of sermons called the Peasant Princess from Mars Hill Church. It's a series based on the Song of Songs and you can find it at www.peasantprincess.com or off iTunes podcasts for free. I just finished watching the last one today and I found that they were really good. That book really isn't spoken on often enough.

Through out the series you get to know Mark Driscoll, the pastor, and his wife Grace. The last video concluded the series by talking about parenting. Generally I really like they way they have their family set up, as parents of five children. And I'm realizing that parents ultimately are the ones who set up what the family looks like and how it functions. They have the ability to set up their families in anyway they like.

Obviously they have God as the main focus for their lives and family, and that's gotta be number 1. Watch the 10th video and you'll probably like it too. There's a lot of great things. This is hard for me to explain. Prayer at the core of it happening frequently in normal life. A really close family. "Daddy dates". There was a lot to be said about fathers and daughters.

I'm realizing that that's the kind of thing I would want for myself if God blesses me with a family one day. I also have a lot of dreams for what the church could look like one day as a functioning body, as a community. I want my church family to be close the way a family should be, praying for one another. I think that there's a lot that the church could learn from a well functioning family. Love should be seen in both.

Bleeding Love

I absolutely love Leona Lewis's song Bleeding Love. I can't embed the music video here because the option was disabled for that video on youtube but you can watch it for yourself and interpret what you think she wrote the song about. But I'd like to just show you possibly a different perspective on that exact same song.

LYRICS:

Closed off from love, I didn't need the pain
Once or twice was enough and it was all in vain
Time starts to pass, before you know it you're frozen

This part (for me) is like distance from God and how nothing comes from that situation. And the less time you spend with God, the less it feels like his presence is with you until he almost becomes frozen.

But something happened for the very first time with you
My heart melted into the ground, found something true
And everyone's looking 'round, thinking I'm going crazy

Coming back to the relationship with God, falling in love with him because you can see the way things are truly supposed to be. And people who don't know that love think that it's crazy because they don't know.

But I don't care what they say, I'm in love with you
They try to pull me away but they don't know the truth
My heart's crippled by the vein that I keep on closing

The first two lines are self explanatory. The last line is when you choose to cut yourself off from God. Also, a vein is the stream of blood flowing to the heart, not away. And everyone knows you need blood to live.

You cut me open and I
Keep bleeding, keep, keep bleeding love
I keep bleeding, I keep, keep bleeding love
Keep bleeding, keep, keep bleeding love
You cut me open

In Ephesians 6, you can do a word study on the word sword and find that it's actually more of a scalpel used for operations. So "you cut me open" is like God changing us or pruning us to bear more fruit.

Trying hard not to hear but they talk so loud
Their piercing sounds fill my ears, try to fill me with doubt
Yet I know that the goal is to keep me from falling

Again, people who don't know God can say a lot of things about our faith to make us doubt because they don't believe themselves. But the goal is to just keep striving after Jesus.

But nothing's greater than the rush that comes with your embrace
And in this world of loneliness I see your face
Yet everyone around me thinks that I'm going crazy
Maybe, maybe

This part is pretty self explanatory. Embrace equals an embrace, maybe like the dream I've blogged about before. Or even just confirmation of his love towards us. God never leaves us alone even when we feel that we have no one. Crazy is the same thing as above.

But I don't care what they say, I'm in love with you
They try to pull me away but they don't know the truth
My heart's crippled by the vein that I keep on closing

You cut me open and I
Keep bleeding, keep, keep bleeding love
I keep bleeding, I keep, keep bleeding love
Keep bleeding, keep, keep bleeding love
You cut me open

And it's draining all of me
Oh, they find it hard to believe
I'll be wearing these scars for everyone to see

The cost of following after Jesus will demand everything you are and have. They find it hard to believe that it's worth it. The scars could go two ways. First scars could be the visible change in the way you live, even a physical change depending on a persons testimony. Or it could be living in a life that only takes pride in the scars of Christ.

I don't care what they say, I'm in love with you
They try to pull me away but they don't know the truth
My heart's crippled by the vein that I keep on closing

You cut me open and I
Keep bleeding, keep, keep bleeding love
I keep bleeding, I keep, keep bleeding love
Keep bleeding, keep, keep bleeding love

You cut me open and I
Keep bleeding, keep, keep bleeding love
I keep bleeding, I keep, keep bleeding love
Keep bleeding, keep, keep bleeding love

You cut me open and I
Keep bleeding, keep, keep bleeding love

That's all. I love it. If you didn't before, than maybe you will now.

Whooo! Jesus High, if you know what I'm saying....

Hey guys! I haven't given you any real update on my life since Saturday, although I hope you've liked the other stuff. So I figured I really needed to put something up, especially because these past few days have been very interesting and I'm on a Jesus high right now! SWEET!

My weekend was very busy with essay writing because I had slacked off before hand. I got distracted once or twice, but overall I worked pretty hard. And considering I HATE essays, I think I did a pretty good job on it. It will be interesting to get that back. That was my culminating for English worth 15%, so I'm really glad that's out of the way.

That's the tip of my iceberg of things that are going on in my life. So I'll keep going onwards... Monday was amazing! It was the last Bible study type group night with the people I'm going to Thunderbay with and also my friends Morgan and Jake who aren't going to Thunderbay. The three leaders who are leaders there (obvi.) were praying for certain people in the group and stuff and we each got individually prayed for this week too. Jodi, an amazing person who loves Jesus and is a really awesome speaker, she was the leader who was praying for me. All the leaders wrote letters for the people they were praying for. Before I had read the letter I decided that I wouldn't share here what was written because it's personal and stuff. But what she said to me is basically what was written in the letter, and it's not really a secret what she said. And it's so cool and I know that God is in this and he's always just blowing me away with how superb he is.

So what she had basically said, was that the day before Monday (Sunday) she had gone out for a walk with Jesus and prayed for the four people that she was praying for when God spoke to her with the words "Friend of God" for me. K, I'm gonna go get the letter so I can draw from it all the things I'm forgetting. The first verse that he put on her heart was John 15:14 "You are my FRIEND if you do what I command you". That could apply to a hundred different things in my life, anybody's really, but it's a call to live in obedience to God, doing things that please him from whatever angle you look at me. Obviously I'm not perfect, but I want to try to live like Jesus and be an example of his love.

The next thing was "Love the LORD you God with all your heart, with all your mind and with all your soul". She wrote out what each of those meant but that's really all about putting him first, and that needs to happen every single day.

This last thing is what she told me was the one He really wanted me to focus on especially. And this is the one that especially won me over and had me sold, not that the other ones didn't but this one hit home. "That you (I) would be a woman [who] also craves God - with Godly appetites". This is what my passion is, what follows, and that she also said: That people would see what I have, and want it. The relationship with my BEST FRIEND (JESUS). My whole passion (after God) is for friends, that I would have good friendships and for my friends who don't know about the good news that Jesus offers, that God would use me to help reach them. That's the kind of thing that excites me most.

I mean that's true to my character, you'll know as you've been getting to know me, for Morgan that God would keep blessing her whether that would mean me being close with her or not, for my friend in my media arts class who I want so desperately to find hope and love in Jesus.

And even today, I have a friend named Angela. It's her birthday today. I don't really know her that well at all because she's honestly one of quietest people I know. But I see her everyday and she goes to my small group so for tomorrow I'd like to do something for her so that she knows that she doesn't go unnoticed. I told my mom that I wanted to do something for her for tomorrow but she didn't get it. She just said that her mom could do something for her if she wanted to but it's different with friends. Moms basically can't forget their own children, that's all there is to it. There's no doubt of their love but if something comes from a friend than you know they mean it because there's nothing there to make them give anything unless it's of their own choice. That's my take on it.

So Monday was really great. I would've put something up here then but I chose to spend time with God who is obviously more important than you guys because I was on a Jesus high then too and I only had time for one of the two, without staying up late that is.

What a contrast Monday was with Tuesday now. You're like "What was Tuesday like?"

Sometimes I feel so fed up with myself because it feels like I can never make the right choices. Yesterday I had homework that needed to be done and I let myself be easily distracted by just about everything I came across. TV, siblings, food, you name it and it distracted me. Now I did get the homework done, but it cost me a lot of sleep last night. And I shamefully didn't put God first like I needed to. That's really all there is too that.

Today I am in a really great mood. I don't know why. Nothing particularly good or bad has happened. The weather is really nice out today. I'm free from a few homework assignments that are now done. I've put God first today and spent time in the Word before coming on here. I'm perfectly content with who I am even though sometimes I make wrong decisions... I don't know. I'm just enjoying life and it's fantastic.

Have a great day guys, Steph!

A Pretty Boring Saturday

Haww... today's been sucha weird day. Like an hour ago I was like "Man, I'm not even gonna go on cause I'm so tired". I still am tired, it's 12:28am right now and it will be later when I actually publish this and get to bed... but you know me - I wouldn't miss a day.

That's not why I came on though, I don't care about missing a day. I just love blogging.

So quick summary of my day. Most of the day I've been working pretty hard on an ISU for English that I honestly haven't done much work on until today. I got distracted later on but that's not the point.

I have this friend of mine named Alex who's in my English class. She went to Africa too, but she was on the rural team, not the urban team like me. We were prayer partners through it all. I called her today to ask her how to spell my English teacher's last name for the essay. She doesn't come out to youth very often anymore, hardly ever. I invited her to our small group like a month back, which she went to last year and the reason she gave me for not coming out to youth anymore was because she kinda felt like everybody already has their own group of friends and so on. It breaks my heart a little. It doesn't make sense to me though because everyone loves her and if she had been coming out I think she could have had a really good influence on two girls in particular who were on her Africa team. I don't even know where they're at now... I asked her how she was doing and she let me pray with her just over the phone. She was slightly hesitant, like ughh... ok. I really need to be praying for her again more often.

So now I'll tell you about the latter part of my day. A short period of time ago, possibly 2ish hours ago I read Casey's most recent blog, titled Blessed. I haven't commented on it yet, but I'll get to it. She made indirect reference to the 5 languages of love, good books I've heard but I've never actually read them myself. I went upstairs to ask my dad about it because I thought he had it. Apparently he does have it but he was working and didn't have time to look for it.

I went down stairs to see what my mom was doing. Talking on the phone, typical. She was talking with my Gramma for soo long while watching the news. I waited the whole time for her to talk to me but by the time she got off it, it was too late to talk. (sigh) It upsets me the way she spent so long talking with her mom but hardly said anything to me. I'm not that interested in the news... if I wait that long I probably want something. Some attention might be nice.

What I don't want to write is that after she went to bed and I went down to the basement where my room is, I cried. I cry sometimes. It's a very rare thing for me to cry in front of people but if I wanted to I could cry every night and no one but God would know, unless I cried loudly, which I wouldn't. And I don't cry every night, it's even pretty rare a thing for me to cry just in my room by myself. So I let God in on how I was feeling while looking unsuccessfully for the book. It was the easiest way to express myself.

Let's see what was I even crying anyways... Something about just wishing I had someone to talk to. I praying and saying things like I'll call out to Saskatchewan if it means having someone to talk to (I was thinking of my Lisa who's out there and I've been keeping in touch with but I don't have her current phone number). I just want someone to dig into me, to really know me. And then I was thinking of all the things I'd like to one day see with the youth group while glancing over all of my dad's books on the shelves of the office. I cried some more about how all of my passions don't even matter to me when I don't feel loved. I'd say that for me, I mean I guess if I were to read the book I would have a better idea, but I think for me the two love languages that are most prominent for me are gifts, and quality time. But mostly gifts.

I ended up getting distracted because I found some random Manga Messiah cartooned version of the Bible and started reading it. Can you say ADD? I don't even know where it came from but it was a great way for me to get my mind off the topic! And now I'm here, tired, telling you people.

Steph <3

Thinking Space Cont'd....

So I'm just going to continue right from where I stopped yesterday. Yeah, I would read yesterday's blog before this, in other words. Supposedly, only half of us are still virgins. A good place to start to talk about this is the different possible scenarios, and like I said yesterday I'm going to be speaking mostly from the girl's perspective. Check it out, maybe you've heard it said before: Guys give love to get sex and girls give sex to get love. What that means is girls are looking to be loved and accepted. That's for every girl, we all want to be loved and that should be a given. But what would suck, and I wonder how many times this has happened, probably millions... It would suck to get caught in a situation where you're tempted to have sex outside of marriage and give in. Not only have you then given away your virginity,which is such an valuable thing, but after "doing it" you go to school the next day, expecting that what you the two of you did together would be kept secret. I'm gonna keep going with this , so follow and remember this is just a scenario. As the day goes on you hear rumors and then details and you know that it's not a secret anymore.

A bruised view of yourself is what's gonna come from something like that. You revealed yourself completely to somebody else. That's a really big deal! And not in a good way. At that point you've gotta trust that the other person won't talk badly about you afterwards. And what would keep them from doing that, especially if the relationship ends?

There's so much more that needs to be said than blog can give justice. Just to name a few teenage pregnancies, which can and almost definitely will bring about more problems. Then there's rapes. I won't even say anything here because I don't know enough about but I know that that's always hard.

IF YOU READ NOTHING ELSE HERE, PLEASE READ THIS: For every girl that is out there hurting from so many things that might be happening, you need to know that you are God's special creation and he loves you! You're not a mistake and you're here for a purpose.

If you're a virgin keep it that way! Save it all for your future husband, because marriage is truly a beautiful. I am a virgin that's exactly what I'm doing. (And I'm looking forward to my wedding night!)

If you're not a virgin, the message is still the same. Choose to abstain now, have a second virginity. God's love is still just as real for you as ever. Nothing can ever change it because His love is true. There's always hope even when tough situations arise. This is the real deal. God is alive and He's here to help us all. If you're considering getting an abortion, please don't. If you can't work it out to take care of the child yourself, there's adoption and families who are longing to adopt.

So that's what I've gotta say. Take it or leave it. The message won't change. If you make it through any tough situation it's because of God's grace and nothing else! Comment if you'd like but I can't guarantee I'll have the right answer to any questions. abstinence